Job Description: Associate, Instructional Design

Who We Are

NewGlobe partners with governments, donors, and parents to ensure that every child has access to an education that develops her full potential and creates the foundation for prosperity for the country. We are dedicated to supporting teachers, empowering school leaders, and ensuring every child has the learning support needed to master the national syllabus and have the confidence to succeed in a competitive world. Each of our project or country teams are supported through expertise and programming from additional offices around the world, combining world-leading expertise in core design areas with locally resident leadership and execution. We leverage experts, data, and technology in order to support and scale every aspect of quality education delivery. NewGlobe managed and supported schools are technology enabled and data driven to ensure accountability in the classroom for both teachers’ performance and children’s learning.

The NewGlobe model delivers significant learning outcomes at large scale by combining technology and customized learning materials. At NewGlobe, we believe innovation and technology can transform learning. Our model – which uses technology to deliver thoroughly researched and carefully designed daily lesson guides to teachers in our academies – is proven to increase learning outcomes for children. We are a solutions-driven, implementation-focused organization, using design principles to work in varied and often highly constrained contexts to ensure learning outcomes and positive development for children. Working in regional and national scales is important to us, as empowering entire generations of children with core knowledge, skills, and confidence is what builds the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous future for us all.

Our mission is to provide our pupils with a life-changing education and we believe that every child should have a right to world-class education regardless of her family’s income. Core to our approach is the conviction that every child can learn, as long as the school she attends is committed to her development and puts her needs to learn at the forefront of all decisions. We have seen teachers and children transform and excel in both government and private schools that we support and manage.

We invite you to join this incredible endeavor that is having a world-changing impact across multiple continents. You will join a team of dedicated change-makers committed to ensuring that each decision we make keeps a child’s experience of learning as its guiding principle.

Academics

The objective of the Academics group is to drive student achievement. To do so, we must know what is happening minute-by-minute for the typical child. The student’s daily experience, and thus the path to achievement, emerges from their relationship with the teachers and the content that is delivered in the classroom. Our team is collaboratively organised around these levers. We develop rigorous content pitched at the right level for students to be delivered by a teacher who is prepared to succeed in the classroom. Our Instructional Design department builds the content; our Leadership & Development department trains teachers and school leaders using scientifically-proven techniques; our Learning Innovation department looks at cutting-edge research to generate breakthrough learning gains. Underpinning all of this is the work of the independent Measurement and Evaluation group, which provides Academics with an empirical orientation toward improving that daily experience and, in turn, driving achievement.

Instructional Design

The Instructional Design department produces the learning materials that are used in our schools across our communities. This department has team members based in multiple NewGlobe support offices, organised into teams that each work on a portfolio of projects under the leadership of the managing editor. Driving student achievement through the development of rigorous content is the number one priority. One core tenet of the approach is less lecture (traditional among many schools in our markets) and more student practice. Consistent, rigorous opportunities to refine his or her skills are crucial to a child’s learning progression. The Instructional Design department structures all lessons, textbooks, and other materials to ensure this.

About the Role

Instructional Design Associates are based in Boston, Nairobi, Hyderabad, Kigali, and Lagos. This is a full-time role based in Lagos, but will likely include remote collaboration with teams overseas.

As an Instructional Design Associate, you join a team working to make a difference in the world. In the markets we serve, the number of pupils attending school is soaring, but the quality of most schools, according to international experts, is low. Writers join our Instructional Design department to invest time in producing quality learning materials to improve thousands of children’s daily academic experience.

One core tenet of our approach to instruction at NewGlobe is providing extensive opportunities for pupil practice. That is, we're trying to make the pupil experience less "rote." We create “teacher guides” (daily lesson plans delivered by e-reader), textbooks, and other materials with that goal in mind -- all as a means to improving learning gains among pupils.

What You Will Do

• Create assessments for syllabus courses
• Create detailed lesson plans based on national syllabi and other sources for all subjects in several territories under the guidance of a supervisor with instructional expertise
• Edit lesson materials (lesson plans, textbooks, exams) to ensure they are free of errors and inconsistencies
• Participate in ongoing pedagogical training in instructional design
• On occasion design and write passages, questions, and activities for our textbooks
• Learn and apply aspects of print production in the form of writing art specs and styling manuscripts
• Jump into new, unusual projects with other Academics or Instructional Design teams

What You Should Have

• One or more years of experience in education, editing, or writing
• A bachelor’s degree
• Fluency in English
• Strong writing and editing skills
• Consistent capacity to meet deadlines and meticulous attention to detail
• High degree of professionalism in communication and time management
• Ability and willingness to write, solve, and explain primary school maths problems
• Flexibility, ability to process and respond to new information quickly
• A team-oriented approach
• Ability to receive and effectively apply feedback
• Desire to engage creatively even with tedious or repetitive assignments
• Proficiency in Microsoft Word

You’re Also

• A detailed doer – You have a track record of getting things done. You’re organized and responsive. You take ownership of every idea you touch and execute it to a fine level of detail, setting targets, engaging others, and doing whatever it takes to get the job done. You can multi-task dozens of such projects at once and never lose sight of the details. Likely, you have some experience in a start-up or other rapid-growth company.
• A creative problem-solver – Growing any business from scratch comes with massive and constant challenges. On top of that, NewGlobe works in often fragile, sometimes volatile low-resource communities and with complex government systems. You need to be flexible and ready to get everything done effectively, quickly, and affordably with the materials at hand.
• A relentless advocate – The children we serve and teachers we empower never leave your mind. You know them, get them, have shared a meal with them (or would be happy to in the future). You would never shrink back from shaking a parent’s hand or picking up a crying child, no matter what the person was wearing or looked like. Every decision you make considers their benefit, experience, and value.
• A malleable learner – You believe you can always do better. You welcome constructive criticism and provide it freely to others. You know you only get better tomorrow when others point out where you’ve missed things or failed today.
• A data-driven decision-maker – When making decisions, you don’t rely your intuition alone. You collect data, you analyze it and make decisions with clear justifications.
• A curious investigator – You ask why a lot. You don’t just take what you see and accept it. You wonder why it is that way, and are aware that the world we see is created by human choices and actions – and it could be different. You wonder, and see the world as wonderful even when you want to change a part of it that is unjust.